Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Yet Another Reason Not To Support Unions

Bethany Community Church decided last fall to start a lunch outreach
program at several local high schools in Seattle’s Green Lake
neighborhood, in an effort to show local teens that there were adults
who cared about them. Youth pastor Nick Steinloski explained:

“It’s about connecting kids with adults who care about them. We are not telling them a Bible story before they get pizza.

It takes about 10 minutes to get rid of 40 large pizzas.”

The church had cleared the program with the schools before they
began distributing pizza, and they operated in locations just off
campus, serving the sophomores, juniors, and seniors who were permitted
to leave campus for lunch.

But then the church got a call from a local union, according to Steinloski:

“Last week we got a call from a union. They said we were
taking away a job, hours from employees at school in the kitchen because
kids weren’t buying lunch.

A union representative left a voice mail on the church’s answering
machine saying that handing out free pizza was irresponsible and costing
people who serve the food their livelihood, accusing us of doing
whatever it took to proselytize to the students.

He said that if we stop serving them pizza, we would start serving them drugs. I felt intimidated by that message.”

Steinloski noted that he felt like the reference to drugs was meant
to be a threat that the union would accuse the church of handing out
drugs, if they failed to stop handing out pizza.

Dave Westberg, the union’s business manager, admitted that he did
call the church, but explained that he had a good reason – the free
pizza was a threat to jobs:

“That free pizza is replacing roughly 500 purchased meals each week, and that is equal to 20 labor hours.”

1 comment:

I can see a few very large men walking into the pastor's office, "Hey rev, nice digs here...be a shame for anything to happen here...maybe you should spend more time watching your place and we'll take care of feeding the kids...be better that way...or we could make sure you place don't come into any unforeseen issues in the future...but that would require some financial consideration..."